What is NAP?
Why is it so important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), especially Local SEO?
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone. Making sure that your information is congruent, everywhere, is a KEY component to ranking well for your local SEO. This is because SEO is no longer about ranking first. It is about providing the correct information to potential customers through “rich experiences”.
According to Google My Business:
Local results favor the most relevant results for each search, and businesses with complete and accurate information are easier to match with the right searches.
"Improve your local ranking on Google"
Having complete and accurate NAP will help you rank higher in organic search as well as the Local Pack of search results. And it’s not just on your website, you also need NAP consistency on all of your company’s social media pages, business listing sites and anywhere else you’re listed online.
Intelligent services are answering questions about your business every day by providing location, people, and reviews as structured data in search engines or as voice responses (think Siri & Alexa). Rich experiences are created with rich snippets which is the term used for the structured markup data added to the website by webmasters. These snippets help search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to understand the content of the webpage better. If the information on your website is accurate, consistent, and optimized, these intelligent services consider your website to be an authoritative source, and they will use your data to power these rich experiences.
The information on your website needs to be easy to read not only for customers but for intelligent services as well. Voice powered services like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google’s Assistant are intelligent services which utilize rich snippets to provide potential customers with up-to-date information and accurate answers about your business. Fields such as categories, people, hours, and even photos should be tagged properly, which ensure search engines understand the information in a clear and concise way so it shows up in the search engine results pages which in turn powers the rich experiences provided by these intelligent services and more.
What are Business Listing Sites?
Everyone’s heard of Facebook, Google Business, Instagram and other popular social media sites, but what are business listing sites? There are dozens of properties online that can, and probably do, list your business info — the Chamber of Commerce, BBB, and The Yellow Pages, to name a few, as well as Apple Maps, Google Maps and Mapquest. There are numerous directories and you need to be sure your business information is accurate, and up-to-date on each one. This sounds like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be.
Review your NAP Quickly & Easily
N8 Solutions has a great tool you can use to easily review your online business listings. Scan your listings on 50+ business listing sites and get a free report with the details. Our business listing checker allows you to manage and take charge of all of your listings and improve your rank in local results. Give it a try… it only takes a few minutes, and it’s FREE.